How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them.

The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human.  In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.

Humans and Other Animals is about the myriad and evolving ways in which humans and animals interact, the divergent cultural constructions of humanity and animality found around the world, and individual experiences of other animals.

Samantha Hurn explores the work of anthropologists and scholars from related disciplines concerned with the growing field of anthrozoology. Case studies from a wide range of cultural contexts are discussed, and readers are invited to engage with a diverse range of human-animal interactions including blood sports (such as hunting, fishing and bull fighting), pet keeping and ‘petishism’, eco-tourism and wildlife conservation, working animals and animals as food. The idea of animal exploitation raised by the animal rights movements is considered, as well as the anthropological implications of changing attitudes towards animal personhood, and the rise of a posthumanist philosophy in the social sciences more generally.

Key debates surrounding these issues are raised and assessed and, in the process, readers are encouraged to consider their own attitudes towards other animals and, by extension, what it means to be human.